Whenever "media executives" start expressing fears and worries, it rarely seems to be on your behalf. Ever notice that? It's never about whether you can afford ticket prices, or whether you don't want to pay blu-ray prices that suggest they coat the discs with ambergris and saffron, or whether you should be able to have a say in the particular channels you buy. Nope. So:
I wouldn't say they've failed; Apple doesn't lose any money selling TV shows and movies. (Or, as the article's curious distinction has it, "movies and films.") Apple is interested in selling non-tangible media assets; same with Netflix. The media executives would prefer to sell you DVDs, please. Futurists want to do away with physical media, which redefines "ownership" as a license to view a product you don't actually have in your hands, but exists up in the firmament on a server farm somewhere else in the world. If you don't buy the DVDs, Hollywood won't have the money to make enormously expensive movies about trucks that transform into giant robots and save the world. But there's more:
Yes indeed. I had to record "Psych" last night to get the Twin-Peaks parody / homage ep (lame jokey drivel, IMHO) and this meant scrolling through all the channels I don't want, just to find USA Network, which I rarely want anyway. It's like having every magazine in the world delivered to your door, and to read a particular article you have to sort through the entire pile. They're terrified people will demand a la carte pricing, because then we wouldn't want all the channels NO ONE WANTS, and the numbers of households the channels claim would drop, and everyone connected with the product loses money.
Fine, you say; find another way to make money that doesn't require me paying for a product I don't want. But there you go, thinking about what you want. Question is, what do the media executives want? Besides your money. No, that's pretty much it.
